Would anyone (beside me) find it useful to have a controller keyboard which has, on every key, a ribbon controller? In other words, each key IS a ribbon controller, in addition to velocity and aftertouch. I'm thinking of trying to build something like this. Or has this already been done?

Sounds like a interesting idea. I would love to see/hear a prototype.__________________
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
- John Cage

I've been playing around a lot with Softpot sensors from Spectra Symbol and have a guitar product out now that uses them. Although they're $10-15 each, perhaps a smallish keyboard would be not too expensive.

I could also see this be used as a programmable slide-pot for controlling MIDI CC or modular CVs. I bought a 750mm one and connected it to my modular pitch input and it was REALLY fun to play! Perhaps a combination of long ribbon for pitch (which are not too expensive) and some shorter ones for expression (using your other hand) would be along the lines of what you're looking for.

As a guitar player, I've experimented with MIDI guitars, which are pretty imperfect things, but the one thing I do like is being able to apply different degrees of vibrato at different speeds to different notes. Is that something that could be translated into keyboard terms, for example by using a key with a position-sensitive surface?

"I've built a few keyboards like that and they were described in the Computer Music Journal maybe six or seven years ago. I began with a regular wooden keyboard and then put a touch sensitive coating on top of each key so that the key was position-sensitive to where you placed your finger in two dimensions. That's very interesting, but it's also expensive to do. There are various ways of approaching that problem in engineering terms, but the real difficulty is getting musicians to study it -- to put behind them the techniques they've learned and to try something new."

Having thought about it a little more, there might be a halfway house between the Haaken and a conventional keyboard.

Imagine a keyboard action that's more like that of a PC keyboard than the traditional hinged piano-type mechanism. There would be two key contacts, one at the front and one at the rear of each key. Measuring the time difference between the contacts closing would tell you if the back or front of the key came down first - the size of the difference should give you the finger position. It wouldn't be a continuous measurement though - it would only give a reading on impact.

Well, for one, you got to choose aftertouch as a monophonic controller. Midi only have implementation for one polyphonic controller - poly-aftertouch, so that is what you would need to use with the ribbons. The regular aftertouch would have to be routed to some regular CC. So even though the idea is fine and dandy, it won't make much fun compared to a polyaftertouch keyboard in more than playing style. To get around it you could use OSC and program your own synthesizer to accept these messages. Or you could route each note to a separate midi-channel and set up as many instances of a softsynth as you have keys.

I have a DIY-multi ribbon controller with pressure sensitivity. I am using a Nord Modular G2 which I can set up to accept the midi-data in the way I want through complex programming and in that way be able to get two polyphonic continious controllers. I only use 12 position sensors though and setting up the same for a full range, 88key midi controller would use 88 different CCs + poly-aftertouch. But as you can only play 10 keys at once, you could build some scanner and get away with 10 CCs, but it would need to be connected in some way with the note on/off data so you could use Max/msp to sort it out in a working way.

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